The good and the great

A couple of posts back I linked to an article at The Millions which compares the reception of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom with that of Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector, both out last year. The writer argues that while the books treat comparable themes and characters, Franzen's was hailed as a formidable and (probably) abiding contribution to American letters, whereas Goodman's received scant and condescending praise of the ‘not bad for a girl' sort. The writer sees this disparity as a function of institutionalised sexism in the literary industry. (It might be, but having just read The Cookbook Collector and the first hundred pages or so of Freedom, I think they really are in different leagues. Goodman's writing is exuberant, but has nothing like the complexity and craft of Franzen's.) A good deal depends on how gendered genre is. There's an assumption that women write about home and family in warm and affirming ways, and that grand alienations and cold ironies are the province of men.

Perhaps there are gender biases at play, but there's a deeper divide, and a more ancient one: that between comedy and tragedy. Possibly tragedy has always had a grandeur that comedy, domestic by nature, could never have, but it seems to be a peculiar bent of the twentieth century that the ‘great’ books, the powerful books, are inevitably the sad books, the difficult, devastating, awakened books that affirm only fragility, inconsistency, and pain. Books that celebrate life and perhaps even end, like traditional comedies, in happy marriages are seen as somehow less powerful, less brave, less grand.  Rom coms never win best picture. Something happened in the twentieth-century - perhaps a great Russian winter - that made comedy with its happy ending the province of fools. Virginia Woolf's comment on Jane Austen shows the shift: “Of all great writers, she is the one most difficult to catch in the act of greatness.” What, after all, is great about ordered and ordinary life in a small community? What is great about goodness?

Another great is most often caught in the act in his big tragedies: Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth. (Some lists include Othello, but others won't on the grounds that it's too domestic.)  Shakespeare's tragic vision has influenced a half millenium of thought, but what about his comic vision? What about a view of the world that sees the catastrophe of life as food for laughter, laughter as medicine for life's various ills? It's the fools in Shakespeare that know this, and that speak truth. It's the comedies that know life not as a trajectory, a tragic fall, but as a circle. Life follows death, spring follows winter. All life comes to an end, but this is no reason not to be happy.

Freedom begins with what appears a happy marriage. Adultery follows, and finally, estrangement. The Cookbook Collector ends with a wedding, and closes with an apt image of mortal happiness: “The hammock swayed under them, and George and Jess floated together, although nothing lasted. They held each other, although nothing stayed.”  Like the original pair: “Happy, but for so happy ill secured.”  But happy.

Even more on covers

While curiosity is natural, and reverence is healthy, there are times when an author’s familiarity with the literary universe obstructs and clutters her creativity. We like a narrator to be literate, cognisant, and even referential, but we don’t like a story that’s simply a tissue of references, or one that gets stuck in the cobwebs of the literary attic. It feels too second-hand, and too clever by half. Iris Murdoch says somewhere (I can’t find it now), the most obstructive thing for a new writer is literary tradition. This can mean that the greatness of the tradition stops a new writer before he’s begun, or it can mean that the great tradition so entangles and tongue-ties his story that he ends by adding nothing to the tradition he so admires. An overly referential story falls short because it’s written in a kind of shorthand, full of gestures to points already made, images already bodied forth, full of obeisance rather than bold strides. And it cuts to that old dichotomy between artist and critic: both know how a novel is written, but only one can write it.

More on covers

This article's discussion of Colm Toibin's book about Henry James, The Master, led me to further pondering of the copyright issue. There are subtleties here, and beyond the question of whether literary borrowing is good or bad is the question of why we do it. What's the compulsion to go back instead of on? In revisiting scenes of literary greatness, what do we expect to find? Or, more probably, to leave? It's a compulsion I feel too, though I've never acted on it. (And in James' case, reverence would humble my ambition.)

I think it starts with simple curiosity. What became of the younger sister? Who might have lived in the house next door? What happened to him in those three years at sea? That curiosity is strongest where the novel's world is strongest, where the author's creation is real and robust, and carries a resonance of its own. We want to explore the empty rooms that exist by implication, the darknesses left by the limits of an author's fiat lux.

 I think such curiosity and the creativity it inspires show a healthy respect for the power of good writing. “Imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown,” and “gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.” Theseus, the king in Midsummer Night's Dream, knows well the power of poets to call things convincingly into being, to name and locate them so thoroughly that they have an existence outside the work which first embodied them.

At a deeper level, I think it proves my theory that art is singular: all art is part of humanity's collected works. I'm not talking about T.S. Eliot's “tradition,” or about a canon of great works, but about the inescapable connection between all works of art, whether they acknowledge it or not.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Today a poem that has been haunting this blog for several weeks in one way or another. It’s final lines are some of the most quoted among the American oeuvre, and it is truly a thing of elegance. However (and I'm indebted to Richard Strier here), a closer reading of the whole poem suggests the lines are often misquoted, or at least misunderstood.  Like Homer Simpson, we ‘fastforward’ the poem and wind up at its conclusion before we’ve understood its intent. 

The roads diverge, but the traveller says they were ‘just as fair...really about the same, / And both that morning equally lay’ untrodden. He chooses one, and leaves the other for another day, knowing he will not come back, because ‘way leads on to way.’ Already there is duplicity, or at least inconsistency, in his thoughts. Next comes deliberate blurring, as his choice between equals becomes a romantic tale told ages hence, and with a sigh. Time and distance soften and warp his view of the choice he made. The ‘difference’ at last is not coloured in - it could be either good or bad; his sigh could be sweet or sad.

The poem is often read as a statement of bold individualism, the romance of Whitman or Thoreau. Yet it seems to be more about the tricks of memory and the narrative impulses of the mind. About how telling gives shape and purpose to a life of indifferent alternatives, of myriad minor choices, in which way leads on to way, and you can see the way you came only when you look back.  Better known by its last lines, the poem is actually called ‘The Road Not Taken.’

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Judging covers

Yesterday's Book Show opened with an interesting conversation about copyright - literally the right to make copies - and the execution of literary estates, about which I've posted before. There's a court case at the moment between Christopher Tolkein, the executor of JRR's estate, and the writer of a book with the unpropitious title Mirkwood: A novel about JRR Tolkein. The issue seems to be reputational: not so much that the character of Tolkein is somehow copyrighted (how can it be?) but that the author, Hillard, is reaping where he has not sown by using, and probably abusing, Tolkein's literary reputation to advance his own. The case raises interesting questions about rights versus freedoms. Do we protect the legal rights of creators at the expense of creativity? If we relax the borders of the literary universe, do we create the conditions for a loss of creativity? Something like this loss can be seen in the film industry, where intertextuality has become naked looting, imagination plays on a narrow loop, and writers peddle endless reruns like rats in wheels. Should we then judge a case not by whether a writer has made use of another writer, but by whether she has made good use of him? Who will be the judge?